SEO Tips for site optimization

By Sef
Posted On
Thursday, July 03, 2014
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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a continuously changing and fast paced industry. A tactic that might be working today may notwork tomorrow so it is always a requirement in this industry to keep
learning and improving by conducting own studies or reading the studies of
other SEO experts from their personal or professional experiences.

While some
studies don't really seem to have shown and proven results, others have seen a
tremendous positive impact that can be very effective for every websites in any
industry such as:

However, this does not mean that if their strategy worked for their
industry or niche, it would work for your industry as well, right? Before you do any further SEO on a website, you should first look at the backbone of your own property for improvement and follow the studies mentioned above. This
list of SEO tips may actually help
you lead your way to succeed in ranking in organic search without having to
rely on various case studies and everything.

Note: Case studies mentioned above are awesome. I use and follow those ideas for better performance in search industry. :)

The main purpose
of this post is to help websites become search engine friendly, increase
organic traffic and improve user experience.

This post consists of the SEO tipsfor on-site
optimization that are not about the meta data, image alt, keyword in URL etc as you already know more about them than I do and there have been a lot of
articles written about them so I won't attempt to rewrite the history.

Find 404
pages

Giving the best user experience to our visitors is what we
always wanted to improve in the long run. We obviously don't want them to be
disappointed whenever a new visitor discovers our site by giving our audience
pages that are no longer available or live. For small or enterprise businesses
out there, I’m sure it will be a huge slap to their website when a
visitor left their website due to annoying 404 pages and went back to organic
results to look for your competitors. So dealing with 404 pages is not just an
option, it is an important tip that should be incorporate to a website.

Also, did you know that this can help build your website
the following benefits?

Longer
engagement rate

Increase
conversion rate

Increase return
visit rate

Trust rate

How to discover 404 pages on a
website?

Finding 404 pages should not be really time consuming and
difficult to perform as there are tools that can help you do the job as quick
as possible! In this phase, you will need to acquired ScreamingFrog tool to see the list of 404 pages

The process:

Have your
website crawled by the tool

Go to URL
list of your website and select the response code status found on your website.

Export the
list of 404 pages and start redirecting them to related content on your
website.

Another way, you can see 404 pages by checking your site errors in GWT.

Login to your GWT account, go to your website, CRAWL section to and see CRAWL errors.

Eliminate 302
redirects

This is rarely happens on every website but it is still
something that should not be kept as far as optimizing a website as a whole is
concern. In an SEO perspective, losing high quality inbound links to a website
is definitely a serious matter. Especially if those links are from governmental
or educational sites so the value of links should be given priority.

For 302 status code, this is quite similar to losing your
links to your site as 302 redirect or temporary redirect don't pass any value
and authority to a website compare to 301 redirect. So getting rid of 302
redirects is imperative especially for e-commerce website.

How to identify 302 redirects on
your pages

Have your
website crawled by the tool

Go to URL
list of your website and select the response code status found on your website.

Export the
list of 302 pages and start redirecting them to related pages using 301.

Resolve unresponsive
website design

While the uses of desktop computers are high, the uses of
smart phones and tablet are on the rise. A study show that engagement on Mobile
and Tablet is becoming more popular in for search
users as this gives them a convenient way of browsing the internet at their
comfort times. So giving your audience an optimal viewing
experience is definitely crucial if you want to give positive user experience in
various technology platforms to your audience.

Resolve canonical issues

It has always been an issue for websites to avoid duplicate
content issues. Although Google has told many times that duplicate content can
severely damage a website ranking in organic search, it is still surprising to
see websites that practice having duplicate content on their website
unconsciously or consciously. One good example of this issue is by having unresolved canonicalization issues; it
is very given that when a website is accessible in different URL format, it
triggers duplicate content as search engines look at it that way.

Example of accessible website in different URL format:

http://www.domain.com/main.html

http://www.domain.com/index.html

http://domain.com

http://domain.com/main.html

http://domain.com/index.html

While we all know that those URLs mentioned above points to
the same page, Google considers them different as pages with the same content
that causes duplicate content issue.

Another way of identifying duplicate issue on a website is
by using Google Webmaster Tools
(GWT), one of the beneficial features is this can help webmasters spot the
potential duplicate issues of title and description within a website, which is
not a good practice approach in the field of digital marketing.

How to spot HTML improvement to a website using Google Webmaster tools:

Login to
your Google mail account and go to Google.com/webmasters

Spot duplicate
meta title and description within your website as defined in HTML improvement
of your website

Optimize your
rich snippets

One crucial SEO tip a webmaster needs to be taken into
practice and implementation is by optimizing
your search preview for your target key phrases that will drive organic traffic
to your website. In organic search results, the more information your
website is able to show in SERPs, the higher the chances that you will increase
your CTRs which is highly important as far as increasing organic traffic is
concern.

There are several types of rich snippets that Google
supports for several content types; this summarizes a page that helps users to understand what the page is about in our search results. These types are actually the information that Google
believes are informative to search users and can give them an idea of what’s on the page
and why it’s relevant to their search query.

Reviews

People

Products

Businesses and organizations

Recipes

Events

Music

Videos

How to get started with rich snippets and structured data?

Learn what
micro data is

Start
marking up your content

Test your
rich snippet

To see full example of implementation of rich-snippets,
visit this blog post by HobSpot.

Implement
breadcrumbs

For large websites like news sites or e-commerce sites, it
is important that they help their audience track back their locations on a
particular page of a website. This set of links can
help a user understand and navigate your site's hierarchy that can give them a
better user experience while on a website.

In digital
marketing industry, implementing breadcrumbs navigation is not just a requirement;
it is a mandatory for every website which aims to help their audience have a
wonderful experience.

Importance and best practices of
breadcrumbs for a website:

SEO Benefit

This helps
your audience navigate your site

Always start
from your home page down to category page individual page

Doing your
website and your audience a small favor will give you huge success in terms of
user experience, longer visitor engagement and most importantly, this helps
your website for being search engine friendly which is absolutely important for
larger websites.

Appearing in “In-depth
articles”

Optimizing your
appearance in organic search is really crucial as this helps provide more
information to your audience on what information they should expect to see on
your website. In related to that section, Google has given another feature that
websites and webmaster would enjoy hopefully in the long run. Google will
reward websites that provide high quality content to appear in in-depth article
section that can increase your organic traffic from Google.

What are the requirements for this markup on a website?

Normally, this
will require schema article markup highlighted the following features:

headline

alternativeHeadline

image (note: the image must be crawlable and indexable)

description

datePublished

articleBody

To see the benefits of this
awesome mark-up on Google, visit this blog post on QuickSprout.

Allow comment board section

Having a conversation with your audience about specific
topic posted on your blog section can help you get to know them. Perhaps, this
is also a good section to hear their opinion and thoughts about a specific
topic. Of
course, anticipating that spammers will come around to spam your comment
section, you need to set some rules that even if a spammer drops a comment,
that won't have negative result to your website at all.

Have some rules:

Use real name

Require email

Don't ask for a URL

Review comments

Implement social buttons

Essentially, giving your audience a way to connect with you
in different ways is a great approach in digital marketing. I know it is very common
for every digital marketer out there to place social buttons on their clients'
website or their own but surprisingly, a lot of them failed to do this. The
opportunity they actually missed here is not actually a lot - sarcasm saying!
They are just losing potential social followers that could be a big help to
them!

Moving forward,
placing your favorite social platforms on the very prominent place of your
website is good enough to catch your audience attention. If you want help with
installing social buttons on your site, you can use the Addthis plugin. There
are free and paid plugin with different design that you can choose from so do
an experiment to see which design will work best!

Give Subscribe button!

Looking to expand your email subscribers list is actually
one of the high priorities to establish in digital marketing space. You need to
have a sky is the limit list but you also want to ensure that those subscribers
are the right people to target.

And this is where subscribe button comes in. By adding
subscribe button on the very prominent section of your website, you can
actually increase the list of people who are happy to get updates from you.

Actually, there is a plugin that I'm using on this blog
called ManyContacts - a free subscribe to me plugin that can help you build
your sky is the limit list! If you want to know how this plugin works, checkout
this review by KaiserTheSage.

If you are marketing your business online, getting all the
potential help that can help you improve your traffic, links, user experience
and more importantly sales or conversion in a legitimate way, this one is right
for you.

Shazam! It ends here..

Doing your website and your visitors a huge favor in terms
of user satisfaction experience is actually a big win to achieve for business
owners. If you don't think it is not very rewarding, it is not probably your
goal to improve your user experience.

Remember that
Google monitors a website in so many ways with (GA code installed) particularly
based on visitors behavior on a site. If they leave right away and went back to
SERPs, this would mean that you didn't meet the expectations of your visitors
and could cause negative impact to your website. So dealing with issues and
looking for improvement is a good combination that an SEO must always use to a
website.

If I missed SEO tips for webmasters, let me know in comment section and I'll be
happy to update the list. If you like this post, you can socialize with me!

Joseph Gojo Cruzis the author ofRankingElite, aPhilippine-based Online Marketing
blog. Joseph has been working inSEOindustry for over 3 years fromwebsite audit,link and content development,social mediaandsearch
engine optimization. Connect with Joseph on Google+, Twitter,
and Facebook. Joseph is also a contributor
onSEJ
and Ahrefs.